David Cronenberg’s 1988 feature “Dead Ringers” is the director’s “trademark” movie starring Jeremy Irons, and loosely based on a real-life story of identical twin brothers working as gynaecologists in New York. The movie closely follows Elliot and Beverly Mantle (both played by Jeremy Irons), who share their lives so closely that they not only divide their professional tasks among themselves, but also date the same women. However, their extreme closeness and obsessive working trends, as well as the appearance of a certain woman (Geneviève Bujold), soon results in their well thought-out life patters spinning out of control. The film’s story is fascinating and Cronenberg-style components are well presented, but what makes this movie irresistible is Irons’s brilliant performance.Read more of this post

This list features book-to-film adaptations where either the film director or book author (or both) was female. This list excludes Jane Austen& Bronte sisters’ adaptations [1] to draw attention to other novels/stories. In no particular order:

The following news article is posted on the Guardian Film’s online page:

“La La Land has taken the top honour at the Toronto film festival. The Los Angeles-set musical world premiered on the opening night film of the Venice film festival and screened in Telluride, before debuting in Toronto. The movie – Damien Chazelle’s third – has attracted raves from reviewers, with especial praise for Emma Stone’s performance as a struggling actor, whose relationship to her jazz pianist boyfriend (Ryan Gosling) becomes strained when his career begins to overtake hers. Stone was named best actress at last Saturday’s Venice film festival awards.

Directed by Stephen Frears (“The Queen” (2006) & “Dangerous Liaisons” (1988)), “Florence Foster Jenkins” is a comedy based on a true story[1] of Florence Foster Jenkins (Meryl Streep), a New York socialite whose desire to be a well-known opera singer greatly surpassed her natural abilities.[2]Unaware that she has a very poor singing voice and hearing, Madame Florence Foster Jenkins embarks on the career of a professional opera singer, hiring a talented young pianist Cosmé McMoon (Simon Helberg), and relying for encouragement on her devoted “common-law” husband St. Clair Bayfield (Hugh Grant). Knowing how much music matters to his partner, St. Clair manages to keep the appearances of Florence having vocal potentials often enough, or maybe until the time Florence gives a thousand tickets to soldiers to come and hear her live at the Carnegie Hall, a large prestigious music venue in the centre of New York. “Florence Foster Jenkins” is the kind of a movie one is happy to have watched: it is funny in its individual scenes, and melancholic and moving in its overall presentation; Meryl Streep’s Florence is breath-taking, and Hugh Grant gives the performance of his career.

The winner of the Academy Award in the category of the Best Animated Picture of 2015, “Inside Out” is a film about a little girl who moves with her parents from suburban Minnesota to San Francisco. The movie is a little masterpiece, and it is a great injustice it was not nominated for an Academy Award in the general category. The main brilliance of the movie is its originality and intelligence – it teaches young children about psychology: the movie is divided into the “real world” and the “world inside the mind” of a person. There are different emotions that govern the decision-making processes: joy, sadness, anger, fear and disgust, each represented by an “entity”, as well as other processes such as short-term and long-term memories, personality-building, dream processes, etc. The movie is laugh-out-aloud funny, extremely entertaining, and flawless in its execution and content, even though very young kids may fail to grasp the meaning of everything that is going on. Overall, “Inside Out” is an instant classic, and, easily, one of best animated films I have ever seen. 10/10

April and the Extraordinary World (2016)

“April and the Extraordinary World” is a French-Belgian-Canadian animated film co-directed by Christian Desmares (animator behind “Corto Maltese in Siberia” (2002) and “Persepolis” (2007)) and Franck Ekinci. It tells of a teenage girl, April (voiced by Marion Cotillard in a French version), who, together with her talking cat Darwin and her grandfather Pops, is looking for her long-lost scientist parents. The year is 1941, and it is an alternate reality: there are no scientists left who could have made the “progress”, such as electricity, possible. The world is “stuck” in a steam age, and the city’s scientists have been “witch-hunted” for decades. However, the final act of the film may be too brutal and “over-the top”, and the relationship between April and her love interest is reminding too much of that found in “Anastasia” (1997)[1]. Sometimes reminding in its setting and ideas of Schuiten & Peeters’s comic Brüsel, sometimes reminiscing of some Tintin adventure, the movie is a great one overall: clever and very imaginative, full of exciting adventure. 9/10Read more of this post